From Search to Discovery

The landscape of the search industry is undergoing fundamental change. In particular, there is a growing realisation that the true value of search is best realised by embedding it a wider discovery context, so that in addition to facilitating basic lookup tasks such as known-item search and fact retrieval, support is also provided for more complex exploratory tasks such as comparison, aggregation, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and so on. Clearly, for these sorts of activity a much richer kind of interaction or dialogue between system and end user is required. This talk examines what forms this interactivity might take and discusses a number of principles and approaches for designing effective search and discovery experiences.

Topic map projects looking to develop successful interfaces would do well to heed this presentation.